Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘I’ve changed completely. I’m a new person,’ said Louis. ‘I’m tired, now, of staying indoors and contemplating my navel. I want to get out . . .’

  ‘And contemplate other people’s?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Yes, then,’ said Louis. ‘Look. Don’t I matter to you?’

  ‘It’s very flattering, of course, and I’m grateful.’

  ‘Look. I’m a human being, you know,’ said Louis. ‘I need love like everyone else. You’re involved in this; you can’t just throw the issue aside. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Let’s have some tea,’ said Emma.

  ‘Look. This has to be taken seriously,’ said Louis. ‘I don’t think people know how to take things seriously any more. The world is a great big joke; they want a laugh, a bit of amusement, and not to worry about anything. But you aren’t like that.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Emma.

  ‘I do know. And nor am I. I can offer you something. I’m old enough and responsible enough to marry; I’m not an ordinary undergraduate, playing at affection.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Emma.

  ‘I don’t think you realize my . . . well, feelings about this. Emma . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t say any more.’

  ‘But I’m sure we could make each other very happy,’ said Louis despairingly. The phrase rendered itself ridiculous in the air, for this was surely what Louis did not have the gift of. ‘I often think about marriage,’ he went on, looking at the door to the bedroom.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course, most men have married by the time they have reached my age. I’m not a young man any more. But my background is rather different from most. I’m working class, you see; it’s more difficult for me. A man needs to be understood.’

  ‘So does a woman,’ said Emma.

  ‘Oh yes; I know,’ said Louis. ‘In a different way, though. But what I mean is, in my class, things are not the same. People don’t recognize each other in the same way. That’s why working-class novels don’t quite come off, because the novel is so often about one person’s sense of another, the recognition of their entity, but where I come from we don’t exist like that. But a man like myself, with a reasonable amount of intelligence, because I really do have that . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Emma.

  ‘Well, a man of that sort needs an intelligent wife. He needs to flourish as an individual, if you see what I mean. Not to be subjected. He needs really to be the intellectually dominant party in the relationship. He needs the wife to understand and agree with his allegiances. And there’s something else.’

  ‘Do you take sugar?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Two spoonfuls. My health isn’t good. I have a weak chest. I need a lot of looking after. You see, I’m frank. And an intelligent woman doesn’t have a lot of time for that. Sometimes I think I’m like William Blake . . .’

  ‘Yes, I expect you do,’ said Emma.

  ‘And that I’d like to marry an ignorant but good woman who’d know how to look after me, and who, perhaps, would agree with my opinions simply because they’re mine, and would enjoy making love in the garden. What do you think?’

  ‘What about love?’ asked Emma. ‘Does that enter into your scheme of things?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Louis. ‘Love is a problem, but one often loves the sort of person one wishes to. It’s a problem, but I think I’ve solved it.’ He nodded solemnly at her, and his meaning was unmistakable; all Louis’s meanings were.

  She looked at him, and wondered why he revolted her so much. She had to admit that it just wasn’t fair. But there were, it seemed, some people to whom one never could be fair, whom one could never take seriously, however generous one wished to be. Because of some grotesqueness, or a simple lack of charm, one didn’t allow them the dues that one granted to people one knew. She had to recognize that Louis had such a place in her scheme, and that she did not know how to handle him. Now, as he became supplicant, a sort of horror fell upon her. He said that there were problems, but that they could be solved. Life was not simple and it was folly to expect that of it. She was of another status and another class. She would want to eat in expensive places and he wouldn’t. She would want their children to go to public school and he would not. But with goodwill this could be solved. ‘I’m like the poet Keats,’ he added. ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections. The Heart’s affections – that’s what I believe in.’ That is all I am certain of, thought Emma, but between what you mean by those affections and what I do there is all the difference in the world, and try to solve that one by goodwill! To you it is a poultice for your chest, for me it is the most intense of frictions, consuming and purifying and changing. The heart did not make one happy – one registered the beat of one’s living on it, happiness and sadness, pain and desire. How could he say they were alike? They were at opposite poles of the world. As she watched his lips moving, close to her, there seemed an immensity of distance between them, as though he stood at the far end of some long but distorted perspective.

  ‘I have never felt like this before,’ Louis pressed on. ‘Passion has happened to me before; I’m a man, after all. But generally I preferred to ignore it, to get on with my work.’ This was true enough; it had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity; that he was at the root of things. All this was, in a sense, something of a come-down. He could have remained independent; he wouldn’t have lost his vote, food would still be served him, there was no real excommunication. But he had decided that this was not enough, that he had to act, get mixed up in the world. ‘I’m of this world; I feel, you know,’ he cried. ‘Up to the time I met you I had an unrealized sense of isolation, one that I only perceived at parties or in theatres. It hadn’t mattered. But then I saw you, at the Prof’s party, and I said, “There, that’s the one; get involved. Life is spending itself in events, not withdrawing from them.” It was such a change I promised myself, such a change. This will make you normal, I said.’

  ‘Oh, Louis,’ said Emma.

  ‘I don’t claim to be handsome or charming. I expect you like that sort of thing. But I have other virtues. I’m not in the pattern of modern romantic love; but nor are you. You feel beyond the ordinary – you’re like me.’

  ‘Not very,’ said Emma. ‘Not much like you.’

  Louis leapt to his feet, pushed beyond endurance. ‘Emma, we’re both adult men and women,’ he said.

  ‘I know that,’ said Emma.

  ‘Don’t you ever think about sex?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘I like it as a system.’

  ‘Emma,’ cried Louis, gulping with terror, at the apogee of his courting play, ‘let’s go and drink this tea in the bedroom.’

  ‘What for?’ said Emma.

  ‘My God! Women!’ said Louis; sometimes the opposite sex were just too opposite for him. He went over to the bedroom door and went in. Panties and nightdresses lay in exotic array about the room; family photographs stood on the dressing table; on one wall hung some postcard reproductions of classical statuary; on another a sign, stolen from some public place. It said, ‘Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving’. What’s he doing? wondered Emma. His head popped suddenly round the jamb and, with infinite cunning in his voice, he said, ‘Come in here.’

  ‘No,’ said Emma.

  ‘Come on,’ said Louis. ‘Come in here.’

  ‘You come in here,’ said Emma, ‘and finish your tea.’

  ‘Please come,’ said Louis. There was no reply. He popped his head back into the bedroom again. His voice came again, apparently talking to itself: ‘Goodness, it’s lovely in here,’ it said. There was a pause. Then he said: ‘I’ll throw the alarm clock out of the window if she doesn’t come in here.’

  ‘You’ll pay for it if you do,’ said Emma warmly.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ shouted Louis apoplectically. He came out of the bedr
oom furiously. ‘What’s wrong with me? I’m the plaything of the gods. The buffoon, the whipping-boy, the scapegoat.’

  ‘Sit down, Louis,’ said Emma.

  ‘At least, spare me one little kiss,’ said Louis, in desperation.

  ‘No,’ cried Emma. He looked at her and she was sobbing. Little tears coursed down her cheeks. ‘Go away, Louis, please.’

  ‘Why am I the one who goes unloved?’ demanded Louis. ‘What’s wrong with me? Don’t you like my face? Or is it my class? Isn’t that good enough for you?’

  ‘Louis, don’t,’ cried Emma. ‘I hold nothing against you.’

  ‘I know I’m not very good with women; I’m no Don Juan. My intentions were honourable; I’m not doing this for fun, you know.’ No, fun was the last thing it was. Love, for Louis, was a serious matter. It was big business. He could imagine no more delightful prospect than that of being seen talking intimately to Emma, walking with her in the street, helping her off with her coat, being leaned on by her as she tipped stones out of her shoes. He could see her in these simple images – cooking at his stove, darning his socks, making their bed, dandling their children, nursing his influenza, knitting his sweaters. And it was images of the same sort that filled Emma’s mind – the prospect of darning his seedy socks, washing his great socks, ministering to his weak chest, producing his snotty brats – and assured her that there was no hope of their intimacy.

  ‘Stop talking about it, Louis,’ she said.

  ‘Can I still hope? Have I offended you too much?’

  He had; but Emma could not say so; he would take it as a slight to his face, to his class, to his lack of normality. ‘I’m not offended,’ said Emma.

  ‘And I can hope?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Emma.

  ‘You don’t see how much I need you.’

  ‘All right then, Louis, but please go.’

  He picked up his damp coat, heaved his black beret on to his head, and she saw him to the door. As she went downstairs with him she wondered how she could have let all this happen. She wasn’t a hard person, making quick dismissals of unwanted people. She placed the highest regard on personal relationships: what else, in this day and age, did one have? But Louis was hardly normal, hardly real. With his great, balding head and cadaverous body, his shabby, shapeless clothes and that immensely long, unbelted raincoat that hung down close to his feet, those large, knuckled, simian arms that dangled from sleeves always too short, he looked an absurdity; in him there was something of the butt. How could one offer him anything but pity?

  Meanwhile, Louis walked home under the damp trees, perversely trying to catch pneumonia, bursting with chagrin, and asking himself furiously why everything good that he touched snapped in his clumsy paws. Why isn’t my life like other people’s? he wondered. What do I do wrong? Why are some singled out for special misfortune, congenitally condemned to writing to Anne Temple or Dorothy Dix, and being advised to join a tennis club or learn one topic of conversation really well? Louis tried to think of some stratagem by which he might restore himself to favour, a neat little social subtlety that might make up for the solecisms. But subtleties! – he was about as subtle as the smell of bad drains. And then he thought of something; he thought in fact of someone, and that was Mirabelle Warren.

  III

  There are people to whom life seems so simple, and so pleasantly simple, that when you look at them you wonder, ‘Well, look, perhaps I just haven’t thought this through far enough – I, and Shakespeare, and the rest of us.’ Mirabelle Warren, the girl who had lisped about the cakes at Professor Treece’s departmental party, was just such a person. If someone said to her, in passing, ‘Life is not a bowl of cherries,’ she would doubtless have protested, mystified, ‘But it is, of course it is.’ For her zephyrs blew softly, rivers ran sweetly, the sun shone daily. If Pippa had gone past her, singing, ‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world,’ Mirabelle would have looked at her curiously, as she did at cynical people, and said, ‘Well of course He is; you don’t have to tell me that.’ In her scheme of things, everyone at this lovely university nursed secret passions for everyone else, and was afraid to speak forth; but she wasn’t; speaking forth was her forte. Affection swarmed like bees in everyone’s heart, and the world was one great big party. Parties were her dedication; she was a sort of intellectual Elsa Maxwell. ‘You’re not enjoying this party as much as you ought,’ she once told Louis, when she found him standing uncooperatively by a wall. If she was mystified by Louis, he was even more mystified by her. How could she possibly see life as so chummy an affair, when people were immense and solitary and one held them in fear and awe, as a sensitive child holds adults, when punished for misdemeanours he cannot understand and praised for goodness he cannot identify. Mirabelle seemed to have a compulsive liking for people.

  Mirabelle was now planning her Christmas party. To be invited to her parties, it was said, you had to be one of the best people or, if you couldn’t be quite said to be that, then fit to mix with those who were. Louis was now generally ranked as neither. The impact that his austere and donnish appearance had made on some was diminishing under his poor social performance, his strange pretensions and manners, and his habit of inviting himself to occasions to which he had not been invited. At the last party of Mirabelle’s, he had insisted that people play ‘Sardines’ and when unwillingly they did he had locked himself in the lavatory so thoroughly with an hysterical girl from the SCM that the door had to be taken off at the hinges. Louis did not care whether he went or not, in the ordinary way; but now he did, because he wanted to appear publicly in the role of Emma’s escort; he was the one who went round with her, if anyone did.

  When therefore he went into the University the next day he sought out Mirabelle Warren. The sight of Louis Bates, breathing heavily, approaching to detain one in conversation, was enough to send terror into the hearts of the virgins of the University; and Mirabelle Warren was the apotheosis of them. She popped into the library; a girl was pretty safe in a library. Louis followed and found her at a caryl in the reading room, amid the dense religious silence, where she was back at work on her essay on subdued homosexuality in George Meredith. ‘Hello,’ he said, in that sibilant scholastic whisper, so much more irritating to those nearby than a conversation through megaphones, which is always adopted by those who chatter in libraries.

  ‘Oh, hello, you,’ said Mirabelle Warren.

  ‘I came,’ said Louis cunningly, ‘to see if I could bring someone to your Christmas party.’ This was cunning because, while Mirabelle’s irritation at Louis’s inviting himself could easily make her say a firm no, her curiosity about who he was going to bring was stronger and she said a firm yes. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ she asked, bursting with interest.

  ‘Well, actually,’ said Louis modestly, ‘it’s Emma Fielding.’

  ‘Louis, I do believe you’re in love,’ said Mirabelle with a great squeal of delight. Her words resounded and boomed through the stacks of books and people at the far end of the room looked up as the words rocked in their ears, and, thinking they were being addressed, began to form a reply. There was a pause; then a steady hissing, the native call of the disturbed library worker, arose. Poor Louis! What could he do? – for he was left with only one course. Everyone had heard the question and, if he was to go through with this, everyone must hear the answer. In a loud, carefully enunciated affirmative syllable he broke the news to all. Furtive giggles sounded among the stacks.

  ‘You must be careful, you know,’ said Mirabelle, full of advice, ‘she’s not our sort, at all. She’s clever with men, I imagine. She always seems cold to me. I think women should be warm.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Louis.

  ‘Attention please; no talking,’ a large middle-aged Central European woman who was writing a thesis in sociology announced in imperious tones.

  ‘Well, don’t forget to bring a bottle,’ said Mirabelle. ‘It’s a bottle party. Don’t you just love them? It mixes the drinks b
efore you even start.’

  ‘There iss no talking in this rum,’ came the loud, uninhibited tones of Mittel-Europa.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Louis.

  ‘Hist!’ cried the sociologist; and Louis left. He made his way to the telephone booth in the Union Building. It was engaged, but he tapped on the glass and the couple inside stopped kissing and emerged. Louis hated the telephone; people always seemed so unreal and disembodied; it was like being in touch with the spirit world and one forgot what one wanted to say. He lifted the receiver and chirped into it, ‘Hello, hello. Who’s there?’ No one was. Someone waiting outside the booth to use it pulled the door open: it was the Central European sociologist. She gave him a sour look. ‘I always get behind people like you with the telephone,’ she said. ‘I am a foreigner, but even I know this: you must dial.’ He read the instructions, looked up Emma’s number, and dialled it. It was access to a new mechanical world; numbers were whirling, sorting themselves out, making contact. Suddenly out of the dark world sounded the voice of Mrs Bishop, magnified and altered.

  ‘Wait while I fix my deaf-aid up. I have to switch it on and put it next to the thing. I hope I’m talking in the right end. Now then, can you hear me? Can I hear you?’

  Louis talked. ‘Hello there,’ cried Mrs Bishop.

  ‘Press button A,’ said the Central European sociologist.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Bishop. May I speak to Miss Fielding?’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s engaged,’ said Mrs Bishop.

  Louis decided that he couldn’t possibly go through all this again. ‘Is she in the toilet?’ he demanded.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs Bishop, as if nothing like that ever happened in her house.

  ‘You see, it’s urgent,’ said Louis.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mrs Bishop. The minute extended itself into several minutes. Outside the booth the Central European was salivating heavily. She stepped towards him as if she was going to ask why he wasn’t talking, whether he just liked to hear it buzz. He started to speak rapidly into the mouthpiece. ‘I come from haunts of coot and hem, I make a sudden sally, and sparkle out among the fern, to bicker down the valley,’ he said.